Tag: Neo-Confederate

SCOTUS Nixes Confederate Flag License Plates

Buck Banks

5 to 4

Margin by which the Supreme Court ruled that Texas “did not violate the First Amendment when it refused to allow specialty license plates bearing the Confederate battle flag. Such plates, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote for the majority, are the government’s speech and are thus immune from First Amendment attacks,” the New York Times reports. “The court’s other three liberal members joined Justice Breyer’s majority opinion, as did Justice Clarence Thomas.”

GOP N.C. House Leader Says Voting Is among ‘Things You Just Shouldn’t Do on Sundays’

Jon Ponder

GOP N.C. House Leader Edgar Starnes
Just four months after Florida’s experiment in Jim Crow style voter suppression failed — the restrictive new laws actually drove up turnout rather than depressing it, which helped deliver the state to Pres. Obama in a 0.88 percentage point squeaker — North Carolina Republicans who now control all branches of government have proposed a slate of similar laws, apparently without any reservations that their attempts to disenfranchise minority voters might have the same result in the tenth largest state that they had in the fourth largest.

Obama won North Carolina in 2008 with just 14,000 votes. He lost the state in 2012 by 92,000 votes.

The GOP gained control of both houses of the N.C. legislature in 2010 for the first time since the 1870s. In 2012, the party achieved veto-proof majorities, which is all but irrelevant since the newly elected governor, Pat McCrory, the former crypto-moderate mayor of Charlotte, is also a Republican.

In a classic example of Big Government Republican thinking, when asked to defend ending Sunday voting, N.C. GOP House Majority Leader Edgar Starnes explained that there were “some things you just shouldn’t do on Sundays.”

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